My love affair with the Guardian Weekly began in 1987 in the Papua New Guinean bush where I worked on a rural development project.
As the only person with a decent pair of scissors, I became the local barber. In gratitude, people would bring me a cabbage, a papaya or a couple of mangoes, and once, a three-month-old copy of GW. I proposed a subscription and your paper has been with me ever since on all my assignments in the Philippines, Vietnam and Australia.
What was the attraction? The Weekly’s global outlook fed my own interests as a social anthropologist and a citizen of the world. And having written a column for a monthly magazine and had a few articles and a couple of books published, I appreciated the high quality of journalism in GW. But most of all I value its independence – an increasingly rare distinction in a world warped by corporate dominance.
With supreme discipline, I start at the beginning and ration my reading to last all week, saving Shortcuts and Notes & Queries as final treats. I especially enjoy your book reviews and the longer read of the Weekly Review. My Letter from Vietnam was published a long time ago and two letters to the editor more recently. Since I settled in a remote part of New Zealand to plant trees and write seriously again, the Weekly has become my muse. I hope you will be here for many years.
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